Coming Home for Christmas Read Online Free Page B

would want
Alison to stay with them for the couple of days she was home. Another thought struck her: Alison would probably expect her to be at the airport. It would be a bit callous to expect her to get a
taxi, she supposed. That was if she
could
get a taxi, she thought grimly. A friend of hers had missed a flight to Spain because the taxi men had gone on strike with little or no warning
– you couldn’t depend on them these days. Besides, it was always nice to be met by family, especially after a transatlantic flight. It would be different if she was jetting over from
London or Europe.
    She hadn’t factored that in at all. Damn. She’d think about it later: right now she had to get Leo sorted, do her mother’s shopping and get the girls picked up from school.
There weren’t enough hours in the day, Olivia fretted silently, helping her uncle into the car and mentally ticking one chore off her list for today.

Chapter 3
    Esther Dunwoody lined a baking tray with greaseproof paper and emptied several packets of sultanas and muscatel raisins on to it. She slid the tray into the oven to heat the
fruit so that it would swell nicely for the pudding mix.
    She’d been making or helping to make Christmas puddings for a long time now – nearly
sixty-five
years, she thought with a stomach-lurching shock, remembering back to the
fire-warmed kitchen in her parents’ house. It had a pantry just off it, where her mother stored all her baking ingredients. As a child she’d loved that pantry, loved the smell of her
mother’s homemade brown soda loaves and currant breads. There was either a rich tea brack, apple or rhubarb tart, a jam sponge or a tray of fairy cakes on the cake shelf, and always, her
absolute favourites, scones, that would be served with homemade blackberry jam and, as an extra treat on Sundays, a big dollop of cream. Although she’d been baking for years and got many
compliments, Esther never felt that she had
quite
the light touch her own mother had had.
    She could still remember as a five-year-old standing on the little stool beside her mother, sister and brother and cutting cherries in half and tipping a plate full of sultanas and raisins into
the big pot where her mother stirred the mixture. Then the most special moment, when they all queued up to make a wish.
    It really was a cycle, she mused as she shook two cartons of red cherries on to a plate and licked the sticky sugar coating off her fingers. She had taken Olivia and Alison to do the Christmas
baking at her mother’s house during the years of their childhood, and her young daughters had loved the excitement of it all. Now Olivia was bringing her three little girls to stand around
the kitchen table to slice and stir and mix and taste and make their wishes, just as she and her siblings had all those years ago. And the same sense of excitement and anticipation would fill the
kitchen as mothers and daughters weighed and poured and sieved and whisked, using the Christmas-pudding recipe that had passed down through several generations of Esther’s family.
    Esther wiped her hands and went to the drawer that housed her collection of floral aprons. She picked out four and laid them on the big wooden table behind her. Part of the excitement for her
granddaughters was wearing an apron. It was almost a badge of honour, Esther thought with a smile, looking forward to the afternoon with her precious brood. She loved the anticipation of Christmas.
The happiest time of her life had been when her parents were still alive and she and her husband, Liam, and Olivia and Alison had celebrated the festive season together, cooking and decorating and
Christmas shopping and going to Mass
en famille
on Christmas morning.
    And now her daughters were grown women, and Olivia had children of her own, and Alison . . . Alison hadn’t been home for Christmas in three years. Esther felt a stab of sadness. Her
daughter worked hard in New York. She came home for a week